


They still know the steps of the dance

by Hecate



Category: L J Smith - The Vampire Diaries
Genre: Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2008
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-25
Updated: 2008-12-25
Packaged: 2017-11-22 01:12:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/604177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hecate/pseuds/Hecate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Thanks to XiDu for the beta!</p>
    </blockquote>





	They still know the steps of the dance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [uschickens](https://archiveofourown.org/users/uschickens/gifts).



> Thanks to XiDu for the beta!

 

 

_"It's over," Elena told them, Caroline's dress sitting all wrong on her body, but nobody cared because Elena was back and everything was alright now._

7 months after Elena returned from death a second time, Caroline kills herself. She takes her father's gun and blows her head off, just like this, and Bonnie doesn't stop crying for hours. Caroline is dead, really dead, and Elena says she dreamt of blood and metal. 

They didn't see it coming, didn't worry, Caroline tired and pale, but they all were. Nightmares and trauma ingrained in their world, walking the streets of Fell's Church, knowing that monsters walked them, too. 

Meredith shrugs it off, forever in control, and she holds Bonnie's hand during the funeral. "It's over," she tells Bonnie later and it is, there was no vampire attack behind Caroline's death, no new threat. Just humanity and being tired and remembering too much.

Bonnie remembers, too. The battle at the high school when the dogs attacked; knowing that Elena was out there somewhere, fighting something much more dangerous than dogs. Sue's still form on the ground; her hair spread around her face like a halo, her limbs all wrong, a broken doll. Red splattered all over Vickie's room, the touch of Tyler's hand in Caroline's house, Klaus and the lightning he brought with him.

And Elena died. And came back; she always came back. That is the reason of it all, isn't it? A happy ending to the terror, the curtain coming down and hiding the blood and pain from view. Forever.

Things were supposed to be better now. But Caroline is dead.

~+~

_Elena left the town the day after she returned. She couldn't stay, not when the whole town remembered her body in a casket, her skin like wax, her chest unmoving. She had been dead. For the town, she still was._

Phone calls can't replace Elena's embraces, her voice changed by distance, and Meredith misses her. She doesn't say the words, not to Elena, not to Bonnie; she can't. But that doesn't ease the pain, doesn't fill in the holes that have opened up with each time Elena left them. 

They got her back, but the life they used to have is gone forever, swapped with lies they tell their parents and with secret phone calls that never last long enough.

Meredith thinks that Elena is happy now. Travelling the world at Stefan's side, her phone calls full with stories of places Meredith will never see. Meredith tries to be happy for her. Sometimes, she can't.

Bonnie, Matt and her leave Fell's Church for college, their ways parting and leading them into different lives. Soon, they are all just tinny voices and tired phone calls, parties and seminars eating away the horror their past has been. So many little things, exhausting things, and the monsters have no chance against lives that are so ordinary.

She's alone now, Alaric out there somewhere, following vampires and werewolves, and she doesn't miss him. He talks about what he sees; the monsters, good and bad; and she doesn't want to hear it.

Sometimes, she's glad Elena isn't there, the sound of her voice a reminder of the times she had left them, and Meredith wants to forget.

She is alone, and she thinks that might be okay.

~+~

_Elena kissed Matt before she left town, deeply and absolutely, and it felt as if he was the only one that ever mattered to her._

He plays football at college, his team building up a new world of comradeship and bruises, scores and high fives around him. A new team, Taylor and Dick almost forgotten, Stefan a memory Matt isn't sure he wants to keep.

Bonnie calls him often; Meredith calls him less and less. For both, he's grateful. He wants to forget it all and he needs to remember and he knows that things will never be normal. Not for him, not for them, and they are a reminder and they are a comfort.

He's not alone in this.

There are things in the world, dark things, monsters under the bed. He's not crazy, he's not the only one who knows, who looks at crows too long and too hard and thinks of what they can be.

He does charity work sometimes, because the world is still worth it and he learns that some battles are harder to fight than facing a vampire. College is tough and it is fun, studying at night, drinking, sex. He's alive. He's growing up. Maybe he's getting over Elena.

Some months ago, he was sure that all this would never happen.

~+~

_Elena watched Stefan when Damon was leaving, and saw something new inside of him break again._

When Elena tells him that she misses Margaret, Stefan knows what she means. 'It's okay to miss him.' He doesn't believe her.

Damon wasn't ... a good person, neither in life nor in what followed. A monster, most of the time, a nightmare of sex, blood and violence.

Stefan hadn't missed him. Had hardly thought of him when he wasn't running away from Damon's threats.

Not until Fell's Church. Damon's teeth breaking his skin, his brother's lips on his neck, and Stefan hated him for that, feelings returning that had been buried by decades of absence. But Damon saved him, too; saved Elena and chose them both over Katherine.

He had been sure Damon did it for Elena's sake, for what he felt for her. And Stefan followed him because of her words, lived with Damon's deeds and his own grief because he promised. But then Klaus came and Stefan fell and Damon stood by him.

He always thought Damon hated him. For their mother's death, for Katherine, for something Stefan couldn't put his finger on. But Damon hated him; that had always been clear. Still, Damon didn't leave him behind, didn't join Klaus.

Maybe, Stefan thinks, maybe Damon does love Stefan as much as he hates him. 

Damon wasn't like him, wasn't like anybody Stefan knows, and he's almost glad Damon chose to leave. Almost, only he dreams of him sometimes, of his teeth and his smile, his eyes and his arms, and something isn't quite right with Stefan. Something is wrong.

It's not okay to miss him.

~+~

_It's not that Elena came back wrong. She just came back different._

Her hair is lighter now, 'almost white' they say; but when Elena looks into a mirror, white is what she sees. White, because she had been dead, white like snow and winter. 

She died in winter twice (she had been so very cold the first time). She remembers. The water around her in Matt's car, blood and sunlight inside of her in the crypt. Death. She knows how it feels like. Not like falling asleep, not like something easy. It's fear and love and sacrifice and Stefan's tears on her face.

Death remembers her, too.

Her friends learn to listen to Elena when she dreams of death, learn that she can feel it creeping away after it has done what it came to do. It has touched her too many times, and like a lover it left traces all over her. But her gift is not like Bonnie's. Bonnie is meant to be misunderstood while Elena will always be too late.

She rarely tells them, not when she can't be there to wrap her arms around Bonnie after her mother died, or sit quietly with Meredith after Alaric finally found his final monster. She doesn't tell them, and sometimes she thinks they hate her for it. They think hearing it from her lips would make it easier. She knows it wouldn't.

Stefan worries about her. She can see it in the way he looks at her, his guilt creeping over her body with his fingertips when he touches her. He thinks he made her that way, with his love and his kisses, and she can't tell him that he's wrong.

There's nobody to blame, she tells herself, and remembers that she offered herself to Stefan, that she wanted him. She still does, he's still everything, but she feels it when people die now and love is not enough to stop the pain.

"Matt," she says, "Oh, Matt."

~+~

_When Matt died, Elena called them._

It's Bonnie who finds Matt, Bonnie who missed Elena's phone call because she was driving to Matt's dorm, a long promised visit finally becoming reality.

She walks right into his dorm room, the door already ajar when she arrives. At first she thinks Matt isn't there, she looks at the chaos of the room and smiles because Matt used to be tidy and ... Then there's blood and meat, and Bonnie thinks it looks like an animal's carcass, a lion's meal, and her mind shrinks away from everything. But it's too late, she knows - and for seconds there's no sound at all before she starts screaming.

She stumbles and runs, but she can't outrun the memory of so much blood.

A day later, she's back in Fell's Church and in Meredith's arms, her family around her, and it's not enough. She still sees red, the whole room painted in violence, and it looked so much like Vickie's room after Klaus was done with her. But Klaus is gone, carried away by ghosts, and it can't have been him. Can't, but no animal could have done that and Bonnie doesn't even listen to the explanations her father gives. She knows better.

'Another one down', she thinks, and counts them. Sue, Vickie, Caroline, Matt. She wonders if she should count Elena, too. Maybe even count her twice. 

'But Elena came back...' she remembers. 'Elena came back, and that's the reason of it all.'

She wonders who will be next.

She's afraid.

~+~

_After Klaus, Elena thought things would get better. They all thought that._

'They should have seen it coming,' Meredith tells herself, her feet hardly making a sound as she makes her way through the dark room. Should have known, because the ending looked happy but the solution wasn't complete. Untied threats, like ribbons of blood, flesh torn of a body. Like Matt.

Like Tyler.

She can't hear him, can't hear Bonnie either, but Meredith knows that both are somewhere in the blackness of the room. She has to find Tyler first, because she has a gun and Bonnie doesn't. 

Meredith wishes she could stop breathing, stop the beating of her heart, there's too much noise around her, her body screaming that she's there to every monster in every corner. To Tyler, and Stefan and Damon should be here; the battle should be fought among the monsters. It shouldn't be her and Bonnie.

But it is. 

The gun is heavy in her hand, warming to her touch, and her finger is shaking over the trigger as she takes another step into the room. She remembers another life happening here; pyjama parties with Elena, Caroline and Bonnie; Bonnie's mother bringing them snacks with a smile. Talking boys, making plans, being so normal. Just them, just life before the monsters came, and she feels as if she's tainting this room with the gun and her fear.

She tries to remember how helpless Tyler was when they had cornered him in the graveyard, how Bonnie and her had fought him in the forest, how he burnt. Anything to keep the fear from taking her over, to keep on walking towards danger instead of running. Bonnie needs her.

Silver bullets in her gun, she kept them after everything, laughing at herself and praying she would never need them. Silver bullets and white ash wood and vervain. She hasn't forgotten.

There's a sound to her right and she whirls around, fires into the dark, once, twice. A thud, a whine, and for seconds she thinks 'Bonnie', a scream in her mind, before she stumbles towards the sounds. Terror for far too long: 'I shot Bonnie, I shot...' before a car's headlight pass through the room and over the body on the ground like a watchtower's light.

Not Bonnie.

Everything is alright. There's blood on the floor, and a dead monster to her feet, but everything is alright. It is, she tells herself, and breathes. "Bonnie?"

"God..." A whisper in the darkness and Meredith fights down the tears, finds the little lamp on the bed stand, and turns it on.

Meredith holds her gun, her eyes hard as she looks down at Tyler's lifeless form. "It's okay," she finally says, stepping around the thing on the ground, her shoes leaving traces in the blood. "It's okay." And she ignores the blood, ignores everything but Bonnie. Bonnie, in the corner, curled together, with tears on her face. "It's okay."

"No." Bonnie whispers. "It's really not."

 


End file.
